


counting teeth

by kkamagui



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Self-Harm, mercreature AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:48:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25041169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kkamagui/pseuds/kkamagui
Summary: Which is more comforting: vanishing into the void, or sinking into the abyss?
Relationships: The Drifter/Shin Malphur
Comments: 1
Kudos: 33





	counting teeth

* * *

In the days Shin Malphur knows nothing but the smell of the sea and nightmares, he meets a man, and not a man.

He bears both blessing and curse, is as warm and eternal as the sun. His footsteps falter none, two-footed sureness cutting through Shin’s meandering, barefoot prints in the sand. The blades and metal and teeth at his hip tell stories of victory and insatiable hunger. They are so sharp, but they do not make the man bleed.

It is not until much later Shin learns the nature of the curse: incompletion, in the most lonely, hollow and devouring of ways.

* * *

Shin has a bad habit of eschewing socializing with other children in favor of sitting neck deep in waves.

Some of the adults call him uncanny, say his father is a fool for taking him in. In reality, all Shin does is sit in the tides, toes curled into the sand as saltwater washes over and under his limbs. He stares at the skies without a single thought in his head, simply lost in the sensation of the world moving around him. 

In recent moons, the waters have been unsafe. Creatures of the dark encroach upon their usual fishing grounds, upturning small boats and dragging them deep, deep and deeper. The people only know fear and hunger. Shin can count how many meals he’s had this week on one hand.

It is sunrise when Jaren Ward strides into their humble town, the edges of his outline flickering like fire. In his touch, there is a power that could be sinister, but is not. Shin feels warm, as though the chill of the ocean’s secrets are a faraway dream. When Jaren smiles, it is a small, humble thing. Shin thinks it looks a little sad.

He later asks the other children if they also can hear the bones on Jaren’s belt speak, but they only give him strange looks, afraid.

* * *

At the far reaches of the sea, Shin has only the horizon and abyss beneath him for company. The waves here are slow, gentle giants. From where he lays by the fluttering sails, the sky tilts east, then rights itself. Tilts again as another wave passes, then rights itself. A storm brews some distance to the west, a dark and heavy presence that muddles the line between water and sky. The sun has started to set, but only just. 

He slips down to the deck, where the leathery skin of the beast he’d slain still lays drying. Shin looks up at the sky again; there is time before the waters become too choppy and too dark to see through. Shin ties rope around one ankle, secures his hunting belt and takes one deep, chest-aching breath. Then he dives.

The world disappears into the reflection of sunlight to bubbling white to the endless blue. Coldness sinks into his skin, like fingers gripping every bit of his body.

Shin is suspended between the sky and nothing, eyes trained beyond. He kicks and pushes a little deeper, one hand gripping his net, the other wrapped tight around a knife. HIs heartbeat is loud in his ears as he descends, and to the naked eye it looks like there is nothing but an endless blue gradient around him.

Deeper, still. 

There: a flash of silver. Shin sinks his knife into it, the blade and his hand so hot the reality around him begins to warp with heat. The world yet moves around him, as though he is merely a small shadow. Shin only starts swimming back to his ship when the net is heavy and his chest aches with the force of want and something malicious. He pushes away the roar of the abyss in his mind and breaks the surface with a desperate gasp, all sensation lost save for the solar-hot point of his heart.

The sea feels wrong. Cold and still, black as the starless sky to trap him in a bubble of timelessness. Shin pulls himself back aboard, shivering, when he notices the thing watching him.

The creature does not speak—it only smiles, baring teeth too numerous and too jagged to be human. Its arms cross over the edge of its perch, so pale the skin is nearly translucent and Shin can see the webs of veins and outlines of bones. Where the facsimile of human flesh ends, dark green scales shimmer in the lightless space. Needle-sharp spines jut out from the creature’s back, trailing further down a thick, snaking tail that disappears beneath the water.

Shin can see his breath clouding in the air. He recognizes the sort of chill creeping across the deck.

“Get off my ship,” he says.

The thing cackles. It is disturbing enough that with its mouth closed, the creature’s face could almost pass for human. “Not everyday I see someone tempting the edges of the world, you know.” And in Shin’s consciousness, the deep voice takes on the timbre and tone of some man-beast, though if he listens harder, he can hear the underlying rasp and melody of abyssal speech. “This is hardly grounds for you to make demands.”

“You wouldn’t be the first merbeast I’ve killed,” Shin says, net full of fish heavy on his hip. The bone fang on the other hip seems to weigh a hundredfold more, and his leg nearly buckles from it. He hides the fang’s green fire in his fist, and it burns his palm with a wish colder than ice. Not breaking his skin, but close.

“Well, if it’s a journey to the end you seek,” the mercreature says, tilting its head full of many, many blue eyes and many teeth. It has nothing like the human definition of a name, but there is a substitute. _Drifter_ , whispers the bones tied to Shin’s belt, _all adrift._ “Lemme accompany you to the deep.”

* * *

He is young when he kills Yor, who is less a man now than he is a creature of the abyss. 

Shin drags himself out of the depths, chest aflame and body shuddering from the cold. He heaves for breath and meets Yor’s calm eyes as he staggers onto his feet, drags them through sand and blood so he is nearly toe to toe with what would dare give him a beginning to an end.

Only Yor looks human, he sounds human. Gone are the untruths of his hulking, ravenous, terrible countenance full of teeth. Gone are the stories of the man-turned-shadow and his purported transformation to a beast of the beyond. The only hint to his nature is the sharp glowing green of his eyes. He bares his dull, yellowed teeth, though perhaps it is a smile. If Shin doesn’t think too hard about it, the smile almost looks welcoming.

Shin is still dripping seawater, the last of sunlight warming the ocean chill still caught within his clothes. His lungs burn from the long minutes spent swimming through murk, and his eyes sting like there is sand caught in their corners. The bone fang gripped in his hand feels like ice, not cutting his flesh open, but is a near thing.

Yor says something. It’s hard for Shin to hear; maybe there is still water in his ears. Maybe Yor means to waste his breath. Maybe Shin doesn’t want to hear those terrifying, kind words.

The fang burns bright and shatters Yor’s ribs, his collarbone, his skull. The body topples over soundlessly and Shin goes with it, but Yor’s soft sigh echoes in Shin’s mind louder than his own thundering heartbeat. In the dark of dusk, Shin cannot tell if the blood is red or black. His hand hurts, though whether it is from the force of his grip, or because the bone has finally bitten through his skin, he does not know.

Somehow, Yor’s hand falls gently, warmly, over Shin’s own. Shin wrenches his arm away.

He leaves the body in its puddle of blood and wishes, stumbles and sinks back into the water and away. When he surfaces, he cannot seem to find his breath again.

* * *

In the aftermath, Shin is almost one with the sea. Spends every bit of his waking and breathing moments cutting through the waters in search for man-creatures like Yor. Goes feverish with the hunt and the thrill that makes it feel as though his heart is in his throat.

There are times when, underwater and out of breath, Shin feels the tug of something deeper and beckoning. Times when he crosses that line. Times when he can feel the world and the cosmos expand with his new eyes and his hungering maw grow restless and violent. Times when it feels the teeth he wields as daggers are his own.

He scratches at his skin so hard it bleeds; better to wear his blood than those terrible, terrible scales of night. Shin locks the teeth away and uses nothing but his fire, like how Jaren had incinerated fell beasts and scorched the seas so they frothed white and hot. But the whispers do not stop. And the line is always there.

Shin dives deep. And he tears into his flesh again, and again.

* * *

In all of Shin’s days, the one thing he has never expected from mercreatures is the capacity to be _annoying._

He does not feel rage as he used to. Doesn’t feel sorrow as he used to. Every one of his emotions have long since been bled out dry, and he feels nothing but the sensation of being adrift. No longer searching as he used to, but waiting.

Shin knows not how long it has been since Jaren died. Since Yor died. Since he’s taken off for the sea and wandered the depths and come out mostly intact.

Reality bends around him as the mercreatures emerges, slicing through the ocean water like a knife. Time freezes, or slows enough it seems to freeze. The sun looks like a green halo in the sky, eclipsed by some whorled dark star that makes Shin’s skin crawl the longer he looks at it. Shin does not move from where he sits at the bow, stitching hide into sails.

He feels it more than he sees it: Drifter’s glimmering green tail rising up to wrap around the ship’s stern, just shy of crushing it. Shin looks at the water dripping onto the deck, then finally faces the Drifter.

“Sun is still out,” he says, reminding Drifter of their unspoken mostly-agreement that he only bother Shin during nighttime. 

“Maybe I just wanted to see you,” says Drifter, voice echoing with a hint of the seductive song many people at sea have succumbed to. To Shin, it sounds like the splintering of wood, the crush of teeth into bones, though the Drifter does not know that. Maybe he does. Maybe he can smell the residue of Shin’s trips past the boundary between man and beast. “Maybe I miss you enough to suffer daylight, just for you.”

The Drifter is looking at the ragged scars on Shin’s arms, pale enough that they look a mockery of scales on his mortal flesh. He is also looking at Shin’s face, and his steady hands. Lucky enough for him, Shin is no longer in the habit of killing every mercreature he sees. 

“I’m busy,” Shin says. The creature coos, chin propped on one clawed fist. “And there are better ways you could spend your time than dripping all over my ship.”

“And what would you do, I wonder,” Drifter muses, “if you no longer had a ship?”

It isn’t really a threat. Shin knows it is the Drifter’s way of testing how far he can push Shin to the edge. “Thought mercreatures had better hobbies than destroying ships. Seducing sailors, maybe.”

“Would you let me?”

Drifter has shifted from his position to better stare Shin down at the bow. Cold water drips from his body onto Shin’s clothes. When he leans down, the whole of the ship shudders with his weight.

Shin leans in close. So close he can feel his own breath beating back off the creature’s dark scales. So close he can smell the promise of an end and something sweeter on his tongue. Drifter’s eyes are like chips of blue mica in the half-darkness, half-not-sunlight.

He pulls back after another second, the tang of honeyed promises lingering just so.

The Drifter only smiles wider, more invitingly, lips stretched translucent over too many teeth, as though he had expected Shin to turn down his unspoken offer. Had intended it, even.

“Get off my ship,” Shin finally says, wondering how far off sunset is. Must be soon. His voice sounds distant. His fingers itch and burn.

Drifter laughs, though the sound is more like wood scraping against stone, like the murky, near-silent calm of sinking-sinking-sinking. And then he is gone, hardly a ripple left in his wake. Reality unbends and the sea resumes its lulling tempo. Shin’s hands feel so warm he thinks they might burn handprints into the leathery hide. Maybe burn straight through and ruin all his efforts entirely.

Shin stares up at the sky starting to bleed sunlight, spilling stars and the crescent moon across a mauve horizon.

Before he knows it, it will be nightfall. And the creature will return like an unwanted promise to drag him back to the other side.

Shin goes back to stitching the sail, teeth clenched against the urge to scratch at his arms again.

* * *


End file.
